Day 3

Looking at the title of this post makes me feel like I've either survived the zombie apocalypse or I'm impersonating Doogie Howser, MD (I can even hear the awful keyboard theme song in my head). I have survived my first week at Wayne State. Yay. I'm exhausted and my eyes feel like they're on fire. This is probably because I fought with my asshole cat for most of the night until I finally gave up on trying to sleep. He insisted on trying to sleep thisclosetome on top of the covers, pinning me in place. I'd break free and throw him off the bed. A few seconds later, he'd be back and the cycle would start over again. This must have happened at least 20 times. Whatever sleep I did get was in between feline molestation sessions. I couldn't take it anymore after psycho-Siamese pulled a wrestling move on me - noiseless flying leap from tall dresser with hard landing on scared shitless owner (me) in bed. That's a fun way to wake up for the day at 3:30 am.

Asshole cat. He looks smug, doesn't he?

I think it's too soon for me to say whether I like the PhD program or not. I kind of went into it thinking that it was going to be awesome and I'd make some new friends and start learning new lab stuff relatively quickly. So far reality isn't living up to expectations. I still hate cell biology as much as I ever have. Maybe even more now. It is soul-suckingly evil. Molecular biology so far has been a review of basic stuff from undergraduate molecular biology and biochemistry. I hate this material, so it is going to be a major struggle for me not to skip studying. I'm already behind with the reading, so I really need to get my shit together. Something that I think has been helpful and will continue to be helpful is the iPad Chris got me for my birthday. He got it because he thought it would be useful in my classes. So I've made an effort not to do the same thing that I've always done in school, which is printing out PowerPoint slides and pdfs for each course and each lecture, filling binder after binder. Everyone sitting around me, however, has done just that: one slide per page, one-sided prints, and 50-60 slides per lecture. Holy shit - that's a lot of trees!! I have a program on my iPad that lets me annotate pdfs by freehand writing with a fancy stylus or by typing in notes. I haven't had to print out a single page so far, which is awesome since I am still incredibly disorganized from thesis writing, ADD, and just plain laziness - there are piles of shit everywhere:

My bloody mess of a desk.

It would be a losing battle for me to keep printed notes organized and un-lost. Writing with the stylus is not easy if you want to be able to read it later and it's slow, but hopefully that will improve as I get more practice. Here's a page where I both wrote with the stylus and typed something:

Academics aside, it's been a very lonely week. I'm not even sure if I've spoken to anyone that doesn't live in my house with me. Oh wait, I take that back - I called my eye doctor today to make an appointment and I spoke to the receptionist. Sadly, that's about the extent of my social interactions as of late (not including email and the internet). What's keeping me going for now is the promise of seeing all of my favorite people at Eastern when Ashley defends her thesis next Friday. I can't wait!

So, why am I doing this to myself? There's nothing like having the carrot of discovering something that no one else knows dangled in front of you. Most of the time, it seems like the carrot is permanently attached to a cinder block wall and you're just banging your head against it over and over again with nothing to show for it - and the carrot is still there just out of your reach. Then every once in a while, you might actually blast a chunk out of that wall so that you can take a step forward, but you still can't ever seem to get the carrot within your grasp. Research is like a sick psychological game that nutjobs like me can't get enough of. The highs (though infrequent) are as tall as the lows are deep. I don't know if that makes sense, but it sounds philosophical and stuff so I'm going to stick with that for now. When I come up with a more concrete reason for wanting to do bacterial pathogenesis research, you can be sure that I'll be back to pontificate on it.

Yesterday and today I've been surprised at how many words have spilled out of me and onto the page. Sorry. Maybe once I start talking to real humans again, I won't feel compelled to say as much to my invisible online friends. Or my computer. Maybe.